The invention relates to a method of encoding a television signal in accordance with a plurality of operations each providing another distribution of temporal and/or spatial distribution, at least one of said operations including estimation of motion vectors for first frames out of pairs of television frames and/or estimation of pointers to motion vectors for second frames out of said pairs of television frames, said method further comprising encoding a digitally assisting signal into binary codewords comprising informations about said motion vectors, said pointers and/or according to which one of said plurality of operations the television signal is encoded.
The invention also relates to a method of decoding a television signal in accordance with a plurality of operations each providing another distribution of temporal and/or spatial distribution, at least one of said operations including motion compensated interpolation using motion vectors for first frames out of pairs of television frames and/or using pointers to motion vectors for second frames out of said pairs of television frames, said method further comprising decoding a digitally assisting signal having binary codewords comprising informations about said motion vectors, said pointers and/or according to which one of a plurality of encoding operations the television signal is encoded.
The invention further relates to apparatus for encoding a television signal comprising a plurality of means for operations each providing another distribution of temporal and/or spatial distribution, at least one of said means including means for estimating motion vectors for first frames out of pairs of television frames and/or estimating pointers to motion vectors for second frames out of said pairs of television frames, said apparatus further comprising means for encoding a digitally assisting signal into binary codewords comprising informations about said motion vectors, said pointers and/or according to which one of said plurality of operations the television signal is encoded.
The invention still further relates to apparatus for decoding a television signal comprising a plurality of means for operating on said television signal each providing another distribution of temporal and/or spatial distribution, at least one of said operating means including motion compensated interpolation means using motion vectors for first frames out of pairs of television frames and/or using pointers to motion vectors for second frames out of said pairs of television frames, said apparatus further comprising means for decoding a digitally assisting signal having binary codewords comprising informations about said motion vectors, said pointers and/or according to which one of a plurality of encoding operations the television signal is encoded.
The invention finally relates to encoding and decoding means for use with said encoding and decoding apparati.
Such methods and apparati are described in the non-prepublished French patent application no. 88.08301, filed 21.06.88 (U.S. patent application Ser. No. 366,802, filed June 14, 1989). In that application it is not yet described how to encode the digitally assisting signal into the binary codewords.